Gwynne Dyer: Neocolonialists' African land grab
By Gwynne Dyer

In the past two years, various nonAfrican countries--China, India, South Korea,
Britain and the Arab Gulf states lead the pack--have been taking over huge
tracts of farmland in Africa by lease or purchase.

This is to produce food or biofuels for their own use. Critics call them
"neocolonialists", but they will not be as successful as the old ones.

The scale of the land grab is truly impressive. In Sudan, South Korea has
acquired 690,00 hectares of land to grow wheat. The United Arab Emirates, which
already has 30,000 hectares in Sudan, is investing in another 378,000 hectares
to grow corn, alfalfa, wheat, potatoes and beans. In Tanzania, Saudi Arabia is
seeking 500,000 hectares.

Even bigger chunks of land are being leased to produce biofuels. China has
acquired 2.8 million hectares in the Democratic Republic of Congo to create the
world's largest oil-palm plantation (replacing all that messy rain-forest and
useless wildlife with tidy lines of palm trees), and is negotiating for two
million hectares in Zambia to grow jatropha.

British firms have secured big tracts of land in Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique,
Nigeria and Tanzania.

Only rarely is there protest from local people. One striking exception is in
Madagascar, where the announcement of a 99-year contract to lease 1.3 million
hectares to South Korea's Daewoo corporation to grow corn helped to trigger the
recent revolution.

"Madagascar's land is neither for sale nor for rent," said the new leader, Andry
Rajoelina, who cancelled the deal.

After the revolution, it turned out that another 465,000 hectares of land in
Madagascar had been leased to an Indian company, Varun International, to grow
rice for consumption in India.

That deal is also being cancelled by the new government--but elsewhere, the
acquisition of huge tracts of African land by Asian and European governments and
companies goes ahead almost unopposed.

Why Africa? Because that's the last place where there are large areas of good
agricultural land that aren't already completely occupied by local farmers.
There are usually some peasants scratching a living from the land, but they are
few and poor, and they can easily be bought or driven out.

For the foreigners, the lure is profit, or food security, or both. For those who
are investing in biofuels, there are real profits to be made, at least in the
short term. But for those seeking food security, the new African food resources
will probably become unavailable just when they are needed most.

The surge in grain prices in 2007-2008 drove many countries that depend heavily
on imported food to start acquiring African farmland. The immediate reason for a
doubling or tripling of the price of wheat, rice and corn (maize) was a couple
of local crop failures and the diversion of large amounts of American corn into
biofuel production, but the underlying cause was that the global food supply is
falling further and further behind demand.

Since 1945 the world's population has tripled, and so has its food production,
growing at an average of about three percent annually through the '50s, '60s,
'70s, '80s, and most of the '90s. But for most of the past decade, grain
production has essentially flat-lined, while the global population has gone on
growing.

By 2006, just before the prices soared, the world grain reserve--the amount that
is left in the storage bins each year just before the new harvest comes in--had
shrunk from 116 days of food for everybody in the world in 1999 to only 57 days.

Last year's generally good harvests brought prices back down, but the outlook
for this year is dire, with drought in about half of the world's main
grain-growing areas.

So wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to compete for scarce stocks of grain
at inflated prices on the international grain market when prices soar?

Wouldn't it be great if you could rely instead on your own food supply, even if
it isn't located in your own country?

That's why it's mostly countries that depend heavily on food imports that are
involved in the current land-rush in Africa, but they are forgetting two things.

The first is that sovereignty trumps contractual obligations every time. If the
African countries that are leasing their land fall into difficulties in feeding
their own populations, as they are likely to do if world grain prices rise
sharply, the first resource they will turn to is the foreign plantations on
their territory.

Governments that cannot feed their populations face overthrow, and will break
contracts without the slightest hesitation.

The second is that when things really get tough--when climate change starts to
bite, grain yields are falling in most places, and what remains of the
international grain market cannot meet demand at any price--Africa is not the
place to be sourcing your emergency supply of grain. Almost the entire continent
lies in the tropics or the sub-tropics, which is where food production will be
hit worst.

The neocolonialists will make some money in the short term, and they may even
enjoy a false sense of security for a while, but they will not get much for
their investment in the long run. Trouble is, Africans will not get much out of
it either, although some of their leaders certainly will.

Gwynne Dyer's latest book, Climate Wars, was published recently in Canada by
Random House.

http://www.straight.com/article-219867/gwynne-dyer-neocolonialists-african-land-\
grab